The Stories our Stories Tell

A few years ago, I went to my first Renaissance faire.

I was working on a novel in which one of the main characters was a ren faire obsessive. I spent some time on rennie message boards learning about what true die-hards might be doing with their off-season time (apparently some people are sewing costumes, practicing speech patterns, and singing along to era-specific songs MONTHS before ye olde turkeye legges come out in full force), and I dove down multiple internet wormholes about what different classes of people might have worn, how to swear Elizabethan style, and how to construct your own hoop skirt.

But obviously that wasn't enough: I had to GO to one of these things. And since my mother is emphatically neither a dork nor the type of woman who dressed herself up for Halloween, too, the entire experience had never really been on my radar before.

How I missed this is beyond me.

What struck me then--and struck me even more forcefully yesterday, when I headed back to the faire just for fun--was the depth of storytelling that all these individuals are engaging in.

Hide & Seek

There's a theory that I'm sure many people would vociferously disagree with: that all books are, to some extent, about the author.

No, they're not all autobiographical. They may not even contain a single recognizably autobiographical element (though I think we could have a three-cocktails-and-you-feel-deep-and-smart argument about how much voice--by which I mean authorial voice--says about the speaker, and how, simply by writing what one chooses to write, one might in fact be revealing huge swathes of personal information, even if the subject matter happens to be vigilante space-puppies). 

Even then, though, the author is putting him or herself onto the page in important ways--the habits the mother in the story has, say, or the speech patterns of the best friend, or the side-character's vocal disdain for disposable diapers and vaccination. Those characters are all fictional, their tics imagined, but they probably have one or more real-life models, and when those models are drawn from an author's life (and where else could they be drawn from, really? Space-puppy reports to command base?), they of necessity tell us something about the author's background, worldview, or relationships. Sometimes the mother is being modeled after a woman observed in the park, and sometimes she's Mommy Dearest, but she probably got that particular way of pinching her nose to bottle a sneeze from some (more or less) known entity. 

Pretty sure the resemblance to dear old Mom isn't always accidental

So what's an author's responsibility to the people s/he knows? 

Things Left Unsaid

Let's get one thing clear: the YA Contemporary manuscript I'm shopping right now is NOT a memoir.

But...

The basic narrative events draw heavily on personal experience. Which means that, almost inevitably, people will "recognize" themselves in certain characters (some with more reason than others), since they, as people, stood in a similar position to events as various characters do to the events in the story.

Which begs the question: how much you owe the real people in your life if you choose to write?

If the best friend in my story is influenced by one of my own high school friendships, do I have to give character-her a totally unique appearance? Different traits? Different speech patterns? Or is it better to make her an obvious riff off the real person, since character-her is being drawn through a totally different series of events than real-life-her ever was?

Would you be more flattered to find a version of you in fiction, or more offended?

And if a character in a story who you previously thought looked like you does something you don't like the looks of, is that me (the author) being unfair, or just honest? Or is it totally irrelevant, since this isn't you, it's just someone with a few of your tics and the same hair color, like approximately 27 million other people worldwide?

To some degree, it's all moot: I can't help drawing on people I know for my characters, if for no other reason than people I know are the only fleshed-out models I have of how-people-are.

Of course my mom influences how I think of moms--I only ever had the one. My sisters are going to seep into sisters in stories, because they're the only way I've ever experienced that specific incredibly-close-and-often-still-annoyed-with-one-another relationship.

Maybe it will make people feel better to hear that basically every character I write, ever, has some element of me in him or her (sometimes most of the elements of me). I'm always the first and last primary source I choose to plagiarize.

But that sounds, to me, like self-justification. I want to know, from other writers and from non-writers, how you deal with this (from both sides, as a potentially-violated original or as a thief of all your relationships and experiences).

Would you be okay with seeing bits and pieces--or even whole swathes--of you in someone else's story? Or would you be pissed off, since chances are that, if you keep popping up in someone else's fictional worlds, eventually you won't show to advantage?

And beyond that, should it matter? Should I worry whether people like what they see in my stories when what they see is themselves? Or should I just hide behind the flimsy-looking veil of "it's fiction?"

Why do you read?

So I'm currently in the agent-querying phase with my novel. For those of you who have no clue what that means, I have three keywords: waiting, opacity, and rejection.

(For those of you who DO know what that means, you could probably add a few choice words of your own, no?)

Anyway, a big part of trying to find--and connect with--an agent that's a good fit for your work is finding one who reads like you write (which for me, at least, means finding one who reads like I read, too). 

There are agents who love "fast-paced plots that get my heart racing."

There are agents who like "unexpected twists with serious consequences."

There are agents who want "a world I want to come back to over and over."

There are agents who prefer "ideas I've never seen on the page before."

It starts to make you wonder, what draws YOU to a book? I think for me, I've whittled it down to two (main) things*:

1. Character
2. Unforgettable moments

*Besides the obvious: "good writing"--that's just a prerequisite

Every author wants to have characters "that breathe" (whatever that means), and to write scenes that are perfectly-pitched, that capture all the qualities of your characters and all the themes of your book, and are funny and tragic and poignant and true to boot. 

But not everyone READS for those. 

Do you read to know what happens to her, or to know HER?

When I think about books I loved versus books I just read, it always comes down to whether the people on the page are people I know, or at least COULD know. Could I guess what they'd order off a coffeeshop menu, or what they'd think about current politics, or whether they watch all of the sports? 

People are supposed to ask that about the characters they create, I want to know it about the ones YOU create. 

And when I describe a book, I might sum up the plot, but whether or not I LOVED it depends on your ship-in-a-bottle moments. I read plotty books, too, but I don't really care whether or not a plot is really driving the story--or whether it's even really present, particularly--if each of the moments you spread out before me individually suck me in. It's why I love Nabokov and Vonnegut and why I've never really gotten into mysteries. I don't care about whodunnit nearly as much as I care about why they'd ever want to do it in the first place.

It absolutely seeps into my writing; I'm confident that I can put together a really well-done scene (and as a writer, for me to say I'm confident I can do ANYTHING well means it must be a particularly strong suit), but plot never feels as vital to me. 

Do other people read this way (here's hoping some of the agents I'm querying do...)? I'd love to know what makes a book "can't miss" and what makes it "can't remember" for everyone else...